System and method for management of communications resources

A communications management system comprises a networked computing means on which is provided a translation agent with access to usage data of a plurality of communications resources, arranged to consolidate the usage data of the plurality of communications resources by converting system-specific data to data having a common format, and a processing agent arranged to extract/infer duration measurement and to calculate staff, transmission & infrastructure costs. Suitable communications resources include PBX telephone systems, IP telephony systems, email servers, proxy servers, firewalls, switches, routers, web servers and mobile telephony, and emerging media such as video conferencing systems etc. An at least semi-permanent data link from the networked computing means to a further computing means will enable it to obtain data from communications resources elsewhere. The data link can be the Internet or a dial-up connection, for example to a remote PC. The processing agent is preferably arranged to extract a duration measurement for communications events included in the usage data. For types of communications events where no duration data is stored, the processing agent includes rules for inferring a duration measurement in respect of at least communications events without a recorded duration. Suitable rules include a defined time per byte of data transmitted, a defined time for any data transmission, and a defined time per byte of data transmitted up to a defined maximum. The processing agent can then retain staff cost data for conversion of duration measurements into staff cost.